Daniel Kim spends the afternoon of Feb. 28, 2020, fishing at Seacrest Park in West Seattle. Kim was a regular at the Elliott Bay Fishing Pier before it closed indefinitely in 2017. (Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut)

When Daniel Kim moved from central Texas to Seattle in 2016 to attend the University of Washington, he didn’t know anyone. The 23-year-old still called his elders “ma’am” and “sir,” and school and Seattle traffic frayed his nerves. Fishing was always one of the main ways Kim stayed “sane” under stress; it helped him feel closer to his grandfather.

“It was the last thing I did with him before he passed, so it’s something very dear to me,” Kim says. He started looking for a saltwater fishing pier like the ones he’d fished on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Kim needed fishing gear, so it felt like a stroke of luck when he went online and located the Elliott Bay Fishing Pier, just north of the downtown waterfront, and the FishOn! bait-and-tackle shop at its foot. He called and a guy named Ronn answered, confirming in a friendly baritone that Kim could come down and start fishing right away.